Cheap Vices and Costly Virtues

There's something profoundly unsettling about how easy evil is. There is a glossary of evil in Mark 7: 14-23—immorality, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, folly—these aren't achievements. They're defaults. These are the lowest forms of desires. It is cheap. You don't have to work for it. You just sit lazy and idle somewhere, and these thoughts, desires, and feelings overtake us. They require no training, no discipline, and no journey. These vices demand nothing of us except that we stop resisting, stop climbing, stop reaching. They are gravity pulling us downward into our smallest, pettiest selves. We at times even rationalise and justify them, as they are human; as if our humanity were defined by its worst impulses rather than its highest possibilities. Calling something natural doesn't make it noble.

Now consider the Queen of Sheba (1 Kings 10:1-10)—a woman who traveled over a thousand miles through desert and danger to sit at the feet of wisdom. She came bearing gifts, prepared with questions, hungering for something that couldn't be grasped lazily or absorbed passively. Wisdom required her effort, her resources, her time, and her humility to admit she didn't already possess it. She had to want it enough to pay the cost.

Here is the irony. The things that diminish us come free and easy. The things that elevate us—wisdom, compassion, integrity, patience, genuine love—these demand everything. They require we get up, seek out teachers and truth, practice daily, fail repeatedly, and humble ourselves continually. Becoming wise is expensive. Becoming kind takes courage and work.

The Queen of Sheba knew something we forget: the best things in life aren't free. They cost us our laziness, our self-deception, our petty pleasures. They cost us the comfortable smallness we mistake for safety.

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